Readable and intelligent, like all Mallon’s work, but overall a disappointment.
The author of a smart, tart series of political novels—most recently Landfall (2019)—casts an equally well-informed, unromantic eye on the entertainment industry and its closeted gay denizens.
Once a moderately successful actor, then a shady antiques dealer, Dick Kallman is dead when the novel opens on Feb. 23, 1980. Narrator Matt Liannetto, a Broadway pianist and intermittent friend, recalls the strained dinner party Dick threw on the night of his murder, interrupted by the arrival of a supposed client who in retrospect is a glaring suspect. (Kallman’s career and death are factual; the circumstances of his murder are bent to fictional use.) Matt then flashes back to 1951, when he was pianist for the musical Seventeen, Dick had a supporting role, and both were smitten by leading man Kenneth Nelson (among the many real-life show-biz figures who make appearances). Dick’s crush proves to be a lifelong obsession as chapters alternate with mechanical regularity between the rise and fall of Dick’s career and the grim aftermath of his death. The crime brings love to Matt in the person of much younger Devin Arroyo, a former hustler now working at the police precinct, and their sweet romance provides a welcome respite from Mallon’s depressingly accurate portrayal of life on show business’s striving fringes. From landing a promising spot in Lucille Ball’s television empire, through decent gigs as the lead in Broadway touring companies, to a one-season television flop, Dick always finds that his embarrassingly obvious scheming ends up thwarting his naked ambition. He stops getting work by the 1970s, he admits to himself, “because nobody, at least nobody that knew him, liked him.” Dick’s personality is skin-crawlingly plausible, but that makes it hard to feel sorry for him, even as Mallon acidly limns the ridiculous games gay actors were forced to play—dates with “beards,” fake engagements—in those pre-Stonewall days. The novel’s tone is generally sour and sometimes nasty. That may be why Dick’s unrequited love for Kenneth Nelson, clearly intended to be a poignant leitmotif, never rings wholly true.
Readable and intelligent, like all Mallon’s work, but overall a disappointment.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781524748197
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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